Cloud save, loading improvements and more!

07 April 2016

BioBeasts Cloud Save

In an upcoming BioBeasts update you will have the ability to save game progress to cloud storage. The worries about losing or breaking your phone are over, your BioBeasts game data will be safe. This was a highly requested and anticipated feature, though it came bundled with a few concerns when implementing a feature such as this and tough design choices needed to be made.

How does cloud save work? First, access to the internet via Wifi or a mobile connection is needed. From your settings panel, you will see a new icon allowing you to save your current game progress to cloud storage. Say for instance you make progress on your phone and want to play BioBeasts on your tablet, you would save your phone's data to the cloud and download the data on your tablet. Progress on your tablet will be overwritten and updated to the new save. You will be able to do the same from your tablet back to your phone. Cloud save is on a per-account basis and can not transfer over to another OS. Android data must stay on Android and iOS data must stay on iOS.

We hope that this feature will put to rest any worries you may have about losing your game's progress and purchases. In theory you'll be able to save your game, uninstall BioBeasts and if you decide to play again later, you can re-install the app, load your save and play the game like you've never lost progress at all. Of course we would rather you keep BioBeasts installed on your phone! But we do recognize players like to play several games and the size of mobile devices is limited.

A few words of caution. Cloud save does not auto sync with game-play progress. It is done at the discretion of the player. It is recommended to save progress after any app purchases, major unlocks and/or high-score progress. We opted for this over sync because we recognize there could be several players in a household on the same account across multiple devices. Essentially we let you decide when to save game progress so that the game doesn't write over game data of another player's progress. This does open up a way for another house hold member to delete your game's data if they were evil and wanted revenge! The best way to avoid any saving issues is by making sure you are the only one who has access to your account. Files can not be recovered once lost and you are responsible for saving/managing your data. Play nice with your brothers/sisters and you should be fine. :)

Loading Improvements

In the upcoming release several changes were made to how BioBeasts loads upon starting, including a fancy new loading bar! Before this change we just had "loading" text with no indication how much more time to wait before the game loads. This should really help for those on older devices. We may also add progress to other areas of the game in the future.

Beast Animation Changes

Over the past few weeks we've been looking over ways to cut down the file size of each beast. As we plan to expand the game by adding new beasts, we also wanted ways to "upgrade" beasts visually without hurting load times and performance. Previously we animated everything in Flash and exported sprite sheets. While this process was faster, it cost us a lot of file size.

Since last year Unity has made some changes to their animation tools which now allow us to do everything we did in Flash, but created in Unity. Unity animations will also allow us to replace the look of the beast for a much requested "upgrade your beast" feature. In this next update you will see some animation changes to the beasts, smoothing out their animations while also cutting down on file size and memory usage. Enemy robots in the game are still using the old sprite-sheet method, but going forward everything will be animated in Unity.

Game Ratings

First of all we wanted to say thanks again for everyone who has taken the time to rate our game. You are among our unsung heroes. Especially the very patient one star reviewer who adjusted their rating after we addressed their issues. Game ratings are very important to us and we read each and every one. We also take the best/funniest reviews and share them on Twitter and the like. The amount and average of ratings improves our listing in the app store which helps new players find us. Recently we've seen an increase in installs and we can only assume it is due to our higher ratings. Thanks again!